The currently accepted way to trade financial securities is to self-learn the value of an investment option by closely following news, reports and other sources of information with regards to that option. For example, before purchasing stocks, most buyers tend to read up on that company's profile on sites such as Investopedia and Yahoo Finance, as well as gauge the trends of rising and falling stock prices. Besides these online resources, most investors might take input from family and friends, or consult sell-side brokers at various banks to which they are customers. Novice investors may be overwhelmed by the volume of disparate available information and the process of determining exactly what stocks and other investments to buy. The amount of knowledge required to make informed investment choices may present a high barrier to investment for many potential investors.
There have been innovations in this domain, e.g. portals such as StockTwits will report on crowd “sentiment” of a particular stock by mining social media portals such as Twitter for activity regarding that particular stock/company. Such analyses have a way of reflecting the opinion of a general mass of people that goes above and beyond company reports and pricing trends found on Investopedia and/or Yahoo Finance. In addition, “Copy Trading and Method”—US 20130268423 A1 and “Social based automatic trading of currencies, commodities, securities and other financial instruments”—US 20130060672 A1 reflect other concepts applied to this field. Additional methods, systems and approaches to aid investors are therefore of interest in the investment field.